Yahoo.com’s always classy reporting on what is essentially a non-story and a non-issue. The Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC), published their data on commercial aviation safety. While there is huge amount of data, Yahoo.com distilled it into the “The Ten Most Dangerous Airlines.” This list is based on lives lost and “hull-loss.” Hull-loss is where a carrier writes off an aircraft to their insurance carrier. Think of it as totaling your car. The list is as follows:

#10 SkyWest Airlines: 3 hull losses; 22 dead

#9 South African Airways: 1 hull loss; 159 dead

#8 Thai Airways International: 5 hull losses; 309 dead

#7 Turkish Airlines: 6 hull losses, 188 dead

#6 Saudia: 4 hull losses; 310 dead

#5 Korean Air: 9 hull losses; 687 dead

#4 GOL Transportes Aéreos: 1 hull loss; 154 dead

#3 Air India: 3 hull losses; 329 dead

#2 TAM Airlines: 6 hull losses; 336 dead

#1 China Airlines: 8 hull losses; 755 dead

Now lets look at the list with a break down of the fatalities and assigned blame

So GOL, South African, Air India, SkyWest, and Saudia were each responsible for 0 deaths. It’s bad journalism for Yahoo to brand these airlines as “dangerous” when there are no fatalities attributable to them. It’s like being blamed when another driver runs a light and hits your car, it is just not your fault.

With the other five:

#5 Turkish Airlines, 155 (last fatal accident 2009)

#4 Thai Airways, 309 (last fatal accident 2001)

#3 Korean Air, 319 (last fatal accident 1999)

#2 TAM, 336 (last fatal accident 2007)

#1 China Airlines, 750 (last fatal accident 2002)

The statistics themselves are not to blame it’s how people use them. For example, the last fatal accident on SkyWest was 23 years ago and it wasn’t even their fault. While Korean Air has had problems they have been fatality free since 1999 and it hardly seems fair to blame them for the Russian’s shooting down their plane. The point is air travel is safe, even on the so-called “most dangerous carriers.” Creating yellow journalistic content just to drive traffic is at best reckless and misusing statistics is simply wrong. Yahoo shame on you!

In fact you have read about my travels on Thai and will read about my travels on Korean Air in a later post. I currently have travel booked on Thai, and this article is not going to get me to change those plans.

Happy travels

colpuck

Edit:8/6/2013

China Airlines has threatened Business Insider with a lawsuit over the content of the Yahoo!.com article which they (Business Insider). I have been asked to remove this piece. That’s not going to happen I will add, that there are some 300 IATA airlines that were apart of the JACDEC report and China Airlines came in 60th. I stand by my assertion that all of the airlines listed are safe and I would have no problem getting on any of the carriers listed above.